Legalization

AIC Executive Director Ben Johnson in the Roanoke Times

Published on Mon, Sep 30, 2013

The AIC's Executive Director, Ben Johnson, had an op-ed titled "The High Cost of Inaction" published in Virginia's Roanoke Times. In it, he draws attention to the recent IPC Fact Sheet, "The Cost of Doing Nothing: Dollars, Lives, and Opportunities Lost in the Wait for Immigration Reform," released last week.

"Yet, three months after the Senate passed immigration reform legislation (S. 744), the House of Representatives continues to dawdle. Other than giving speeches and mulling over a few backward-looking, enforcement-only bills, the House has done nothing to revamp the broken U.S. immigration system or put forward any vision of what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants now living in the United States — 210,000 of whom call Virginia home. The standard excuse for this inaction is that there are too many other high-priority items on the legislative agenda right now — so immigration reform will have to wait.

"But while Congress waits, dollars and lives are being lost."

Published in the Roanoke Times

Hannah Gill, Ph.D.

Hannah Gill, Ph.D. is Research Associate at the Center for Global Initiatives and Assistant Director at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hannah received her doctorate in Social Anthropology with a specialization in Latin American migration from the University of Oxford, England in 2004. She is a native of Alamance County, North Carolina and alumna of UNC Chapel Hill. She is co‐author of the publication, "Going to Carolina de Norte, narrating Mexican migrant experiences” and the author of The Latino Migration Experience in North Carolina, available at UNC Press.

Latinos in North Carolina: A Growing Part of the State’s Economic and Social Landscape (IPC Perspectives, March 2012)

IPC Data Cited in Latin Times

Published on Thu, Apr 24, 2014

The Latin Times recently cited the IPC report "Understanding Prosecutorial Discretion in Immigration Law" in an article titled "ICE Data Says Agency Rarely Uses ‘Prosecutorial Discretion’ To Close Cases Against Immigrants".

"The Immigration Policy Center notes that discretion can be used at any stage of an immigration case, from the apprehension phase – when it comes to stopping, questioning and arresting particular people, focusing resources on certain violations or conduct, or detaining people already in police custody or under supervision – to referring cases to courts to begin deportation proceedings. In most of the country, it appears that authorities rarely practice such discretion after proceedings are already opened: between October 2012 and March 2014, the group reports, ICE intervened to close only 6.7 percent of cases they’d earlier referred to the courts. The percentage varied widely by region; in Tucson and Seattle, it was around 30 percent."

Published in the Latin Times

Peter Schrag

Peter Schrag, for many years the editorial page editor and later a weekly columnist for the Sacramento Bee, currently contributes to The Nation, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of several books, including Paradise Lost and California: America's High‐Stakes Experiment and Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America's Schools. This article is drawn from Peter Schrag’s Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America, University of California Press, 2010.

The Unwanted: Immigration and Nativism in America (IPC Perspectives, September 2010)

California's Immigrants, Latinos, and Asians are a Political and Economic Powerhouse

Released on Wed, Feb 25, 2009

California's $42 billion deficit has led to a lot of misplaced blame on the immigrant, Latino, and Asian communities that comprise the state's economic backbone. Yet immigrant, Latino, and Asian workers and entrepreneurs are integral to rebuilding California's economy and tax base. The state may be facing hard economic times, but the California dream is anything but dead—immigrants and their families are part of the very engine that keeps California's future alive.

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CBP Abuse of Authority

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents across the country routinely disregard basic constitutional protections and the human rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens. Along both the northern and southern borders, CBP agents routinely overstep the boundaries of their authority by conducting enforcement activities outside border regions, making racially motivated arrests, employing derogatory and coercive interrogation tactics, and imprisoning arrestees under inhumane conditions.

In an effort to promote greater accountability by CBP on this issue, the Legal Action Center of the American Immigration Council, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties are coordinating a national litigation effort. Through this effort, during the week prior to March 12, 2012, attorneys in states along both the northern and southern borders filed individual complaints for damages on behalf of ten individuals who had suffered abuse at the hands of CBP agents. These complaints highlight the breadth of the problem and the culture of impunity that has taken hold within the agency.Read more...

Does the "SAVE Act" Save Anything?

Released on Wed, Apr 16, 2008

This month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with an estimate of the costs of the "Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act" ("SAVE Act," HR 4088) that showed that implementing "SAVE" would cost the government billions of dollars in spending and cause the government to lose billions of dollars in tax revenue. This week we highlight two new documents that look at the costs of SAVE and impact of E-Verify.

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Immigration in Connecticut

State Fact Sheets

District-by-District Profiles

We have not created any Connecticut district profiles yet. For Congressional districts in other states, visit our District-by-District page.

Fact Sheets and Reports

We do not have any Connecticut-specific fact sheets or reports yet, but you can find more information on State Immigration Legislation here.Read more...

Implementation Costs of SB 1070 to One Arizona County

Estimates Indicate Costs Could Rise into the Hundreds of Millions of Dollars for Entire State

Released on Fri, Apr 23, 2010

Washington D.C. - Today, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer may sign into law a bill that has the potential to sink her state much deeper into the red than it already is. Touting a $10 million investment into local law enforcement from discretionary federal stimulus money the state received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Governor Brewer is gambling with Arizona's economy. The costs associated with SB 1070 have not been quantified by the Arizona legislature but it is safe to assume that $10 million dollars is only a drop in the bucket towards what it would actually cost to enforce this law.

In Arizona, when a bill is introduced in the state legislature, a "fiscal note" is attached which lays out the cost of implementation. In the case of SB 1070, the accompanying fiscal note is shockingly lacking in detail, concluding that "the fiscal impact of this bill cannot be determined with certainty. We do not have a means to quantify the number of individuals arrested under the bill's provisions or the impact on the level of illegal immigration." At a time when Arizona is facing a multi-billion dollar deficit, however, enacting an enforcement program that will surely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars is fiscally irresponsible at best.

In the absence of any current fiscal data on the cost of SB 1070's implementation, some Arizonans are pointing to a fact sheet produced by Yuma County Sheriff Ralph E. Ogden in response to similar legislation proposed in 2006. Yuma County is one of Arizona's 15 counties, with a population of about 200,000.Read more...

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